Provisioning a new subscriber on a telecommunications network requires that the subscriber be allocated network resources (ports, bandwidth, voice mail boxes, a telephone number, etc.) and granted permission to access and use the network and/or service.
Provisioning a new subscriber can be an expensive undertaking for a telecommunications carrier and an inconvenient process to the new subscriber. For example, to activate traditional telephone service, a subscriber needs to visit a service center or call the telephone carrier from an already established line to request the service, provide billing and credit information, select optional telephone services like call forwarding or call waiting, and find out what the assigned telephone number for the new line will be. The carrier needs to operate service and/or call-centers and have agents to collect and manually enter this subscriber information into their systems. In all likelihood, activities by several different employees will be required to actually provision the service.
For a wireless system, such as a PCS or cellular phone, the process of provisioning a new subscriber is even more complicated. A new subscriber first purchases the cellular phone, typically at a service kiosk or sales outlet. At this time, the vendor has to collect billing and credit information and the wireless telephone is programmed with its telephone number and service features. The serial number, EIN or other identifier of the wireless telephone is programmed into the wireless network to allow that particular telephone to access the network.
A number of different innovations attempting to improve the process of provisioning new telephony services are known.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,191 (Gerszberg) describes a method of downloading provisioning parameters into a wireless telephone set. The method uses dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones transmitted from the base station to program in authorization codes and/or to activate new features. While this system could reduce some of the cost of provisioning, it is limited in practice to provisioning services and features which are already programmed into the wireless telephone set.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,485,505 (Norman, et al.) teaches a method to reduce a carrier's cost by programming a sequence of provisioning questions into the wireless telephone set itself. Upon activation, the telephone set prompts the subscriber for information based upon the programming. The wireless telephone then transmits the subscriber's answers to the wireless base station. While this method may obviate some of the costs of activation, the carrier's ability to change or update its activation methods rapidly is lost since the software to implement the process is preprogrammed into telephones already out in the market.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,551,073 (Sammarco) describes a wireless telephone set that is operable in two modes: an operations mode and a setup mode. During setup mode, a user can enter authentication information into the phone set that will enable the telephone to be used in operations mode. Again, this method restricts the carrier's ability to change its activation methods as the activation prompts and processes are pre-programmed and stored in the phones themselves.
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has published IS-683 (also known as PN-3889), a standard to allow over-the-air service provisioning (OTASP). OTASP works by temporarily provisioning a wireless telephone set to allow a subscriber to call a customer service center where long-term provisioning can be obtained. IS-683 allows carriers to centralize their operations, but still requires agent involvement in the activation process as the process merely mimics the connected land-line process.
Each of the above prior art techniques suffers from disadvantages in the efficiency, flexibility and/or cost of implementing the technique. It is therefore desired to have a system, apparatus and method to provision telecommunications services in a more efficient, flexible, simple (to the end user) and/or cost effective manner.